I don't know how the OP did it, but this is pretty easy to so if you buy an AVR ISP II which are $35. You can write the program in the Arduino environment, taking care to only use the pins that exist on the ATTiny, and upload it using Atmel Studio. You provide a 6 pin header that goes to +5V, GND, and four pins on the chip (RST, MOSI, SCK, and MISO) There are other bits of software which will do this too and you can use an Arduino as a programmer but I found that AVR ISP II (cheap) and AVR Studio (free) seem to be a good way to achieve it.

http://store.atmel.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:10500054

The six wires coming off the board to the bottom left is the OP's programming interface, the AVR ISP uses a 6-conductor ribbon connector. Possibly he is using the arduino route or an Atmel Dragon.

I got a cheap ISP programmer off eBay (search for "usbtinyisp") and connected it to the ATtiny85. That's the wires you see coming in from bottom-left. I literally just poked patch wires into the ISP connector to connect it to the breadboard.

I got the TLS5940 control down to three pins on my Tiny85. It was much easier than I thought, took me ten minutes to adapt the previous version.

I now have two pins free. I'm going to connect two potentiometers as input so I can set a color range for some RGB LEDs. The LEDs will fade around within that color range. I just need to figure out how to read the chip's ADC under interrupts (the TLC driver uses 100% CPU to drive the 5940).

(Edited this thread to change all images to attachments so they'll be visible for eternity, even if my server dies...)

That's good. But I don't think the code is really using 100% of the CPU in the normal sense of the idea. The CPU is always running at 100% - it's just running the main loop code over and over - it's not a infinite length blocking call or anything like that. If you put something in your main loop to read the pot you will be fine, it will probably be reading that pot a few thousand times a second.

What is that blue box anyway, is that a fancy despiking cap? I don't have any that look like a blue box, that is new to me.

That's good. But I don't think the code is really using 100% of the CPU in the normal sense of the idea. The CPU is always running at 100% - it's just running the main loop code over and over - it's not a infinite length blocking call or anything like that. If you put something in your main loop to read the pot you will be fine, it will probably be reading that pot a few thousand times a second.

The CPU spends most of its time generating a clock output on a pin at about 4MHz (the tlc5940 needs a clock signal for the PWM). That's 100% in my book...

I got the pot working. I couldn't use analogRead() because it blocks until the conversion finishes. I need conversion in parallel so I can keep the PWM clock going. It wasn't too hard to program the ADC directly though.

Register level AVR programming is turning out to be very easy, I almost prefer it to using the Arduino library (which is VERY inefficient BTW). You can do some cool stuff, too, eg. flip the state of digital output pins directly (no read-modify-write needed) using the "PIN" register. I can't think why they didn't include a function in the library to use that (maybe some early AVR chips can't do it)

http://hackaday.com/2012/08/13/teensy-tiny-arduino-board-with-an-attiny85/I've been thinking about trying some of these, They are the same thing you are doing, but in a nice little package.After you've programmed it, you cold cut off the tab and and make it even smaller.

http://hackaday.com/2012/08/13/teensy-tiny-arduino-board-with-an-attiny85/I've been thinking about trying some of these, They are the same thing you are doing, but in a nice little package.After you've programmed it, you cold cut off the tab and and make it even smaller.

Hmmm...looks cute but it's quite expensive for just a chip on a PCB. Plus it uses a bootloader, ick!

I just bought some of these on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/190747889648

I haven't used one yet but six holes wide is just enough for a Tiny85 and a connecting wire along each side (see attached image). 4 holes long is enough for the Tiny85 and I can snip the boards to any length I want for individual projects.

The Digispark looks about 8x6 holes big - a PCB that huge would have half of it free for extra components.